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LIFE OF BUDDHA.
made a great sacrifice at which no animals were slain and no trees were cut down; simply libations of milk, oil,
The best and honey were offered. But Buddha proclaims sacrifice. that a better and easier sacrifice than that, is to make gifts to pious monks, and build dwelling-places for him and his Order. A higher offering was to accept Buddha's doctrine; higher still to become a monk; while the highest offering was to obtain deliverance, and the knowledge, “I shall not again return to this world.”
How far the rival ascetic bodies and their leaders openly disputed the progress of Buddha we cannot tell. Later we find some traces of interchange of civilities between them, and also some attempts to deprive each other of the aid of influential people. Buddha's greatest distinction from the various brotherhoods was his disparagement of self-mortification. He had discovered that this last was gloomy, unworthy, unreal. The life of pleasure and sensual enjoyment was base and ignoble. The perfect life was the middle way, the eight-fold path. Thus he exemplified with remarkable force the strength which lies in a middle course ; it certainly powerfully helped to make his the religious community with the largest following in the world.
The general method of Buddha's teaching was oral and conversational. Such a thing as writing a book was
Method not then dreamt of, although book-learning of teaching. was highly developed. But learning by heart seemed then the only possible or stable form of it; and no doubt it was once thought a great innovation, and probably an unreasonable thing, for any one to attempt to write out a book in full, when it was so easy and so common to commit the contents to memory. We, with our comparatively feeble recollections of the contents of any given book, do not realise a state of society when people who were learned knew their few books by heart more perfectly than most of us know anything. But personal teaching was then as influential as it ever has been, perhaps more so. The accounts given of Buddha's interviews with disciples, even if not precisely accurate, must represent a kind of interview which was the com
